Monday
Home Up Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Dedication

 

We leave our hotels at 5:30 am for the work site, over 1000 international volunteers joining even more South Africans.  At the site we find our breakfast in the chilly darkness.  Millard Fuller leads the first morning's devotions at dawn.  Millard is impassioned about our mission being God's work.

Every one is eager and ready to go.  (Even without much coffee; the South Africans had not anticipated our dependence on the stuff.) 
Over 2000 of us head off to find our houses.  The site is on a steep hillside, the location of a once integrated Indian/African neighborhood, bulldozed in the 40s as apartheid is implemented.  

(more about the site later.)
House 943 at the beginning.  Some hard work has been done to get ready.  Homeowners and Durban volunteers had been working for some time.  At this time:
  • The slab is in.
  • The corner posts are built.
  • The scaffolding is in place.
  • Windows are ready.
  • Electrical service has been run.
  • The sewer line has been run.
  • The streets and curbs are in.
  • Supplies are laid out.

What a massive amount of organization was required!
Monica lays the first block.We are happy to meet our homeowner, Sithombana Dhlamini who immediately invited us to call her "Monica", much more manageable for international visitors.

Monica is a widow with two daughters.  Once is away at boarding school, in part because there is no room.  The second is off in job training for KFC.  (That's right, Kentucky-Fried, very popular in SA for decades.)  Visible pride appears when she talks of her girls.

Monica is a domestic, working for a family that lives not far from this site.  They are very supportive, spending the week volunteering elsewhere on the project.  
This picture got rather swamped by the bright background, but I want to show the crew that did the east wall.

Clockwise from lower left: Eric Haaland is a divinity student in St. Paul;  Gabisile Hlophe just finished secondary school in Durban; Ghirmay Fasil Tesfamichael is an architecture student from Eritrea; your truly.
By lunch time, we are making progress, but slowly.  Few of us feel much confidence with laying block, but our house leader, Mel Hechel, assures us that we will get it done by the end of the day.
Now we all get after the brick-laying.  The crew for the front wall is led by Joe Robrecht from Michigan (yellow hats indicate crew leaders.)  Jerry Feese of Lawrence wears the white shirt.  Bonnie Hallam (red shirt Philadelphia) works with Jerry, and Quentin Knauer is from Ohio.  If I recall correctly, Quentin is and 80-year-old retired physician and still Habitating!

 
Jerry Feese of Lawrence, Kansas, my traveling partner.

The afternoon goes better, but we are still pushing it at 5 pm which was supposed to be quitting time.

We keep pushing and manage to complete the blocks before it becomes very dark.  Then, before dinner, we need to clean our tools.

It is quite dark when I go to retrieve my tool bag inside the house and injure my leg on the scaffolding.  I spend much of the evening in the hospital.